Outside Looking In

The door of the U.S. Senate chamber opened one afternoon last week, and a guest was ushered in. Harry S. Truman, tanned and eupeptic, not quite as trim and natty as he used to be (he no longer has a personal valet), beamed as Senators and visitors broke into applause.

Hard Pickup. Without hesitating, the ex-President strode to the desk of his old political foe, Robert A. Taft, the ailing majority leader. The two shook hands, smiled and chatted. Then Truman was ushered to the rear-row seat he occupied for ten years as a Senator. He made a little speech, remarked that he always liked the seat, because it was so close to the door and he could duck out when the going got hot. After his speech, Truman shook hands all around and moved ahead on his visitors' schedule. When a Washington Star cartoon showed him standing outside the White House fence with camera in hand, Tourist Truman said: "Well, I'd rather be on the outside looking in than on the inside looking out."

In a suite at Washington's Mayflower Hotel, old Truman aides gathered around. The old ghostwriters, headed by Washington Lawyer Charles Murphy, went to work on a speech. As the visitor rode down the street one day, he spotted an old friend. It took several honks of the horn to get the man's eye, and then ex-President Harry Truman said to ex-Secretary of State Dean Acheson: "You're the hardest pickup I ever encountered."

Pocketbook Judgment? After a series of reunions, Truman boarded a train for Philadelphia. There, in his speech to the Reserve Officers Association, he took credit for some of the favorable developments in the world, e.g., the Communists are having trouble in East Germany largely "because of things that this nation did last year, or the year before, or four or five years ago." He came out hard against defense budget cuts: "I think that those who talk about our defense program being too big may be letting their pocketbooks obscure their judgment."

After this re-entry into the political arena, Harry Truman took a train to New York City to join Mrs. Truman and Margaret. He checked into suite 32-A in the Waldorf Towers, directly above Herbert Hoover's suite (31-A) and five floors directly below the suite (37-A) of Douglas MacArthur. He dropped down to the Waldorf barbershop to get a haircut, and let photographers snap him as he is rarely seen--without glasses (see cut).

In the midst of Truman's New York stay, Wisconsin's Senator Joe McCarthy announced that his Investigations Subcommittee may invite the ex-President to testify in a new investigation of alleged atom spies. Reporters hurried over to see what Truman had to say. Said Harry Truman : "What I could tell you, you wouldn't print--therefore ... no comment."

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